By Dorian Dawes
When it comes to comfort watches, I can think of few better movies than the 1987 Danish film, Babette’s Feast. The film, based on a 1958 short story by Karen Blixen, follows a French refugee named Babette Hersant as she finds home within an isolated religious community after the Franco-Prussian war. The entire first hour is a masterwork on how to layer quiet tragedy upon quiet tragedy. There is death, lost love, lost faith, and a myriad of hurt that slowly causes this community to drift apart until they cannot gather long without picking at old wounds and causing them to bleed anew. When Babette, who has been working as a servant in this village, wins the lottery, she wishes to repay the sisters who took her in with a French meal, sacrificing all her new riches on an act of intensive labor that brings life back into this dour community. The feast nourishes everyone both physically and spiritually in a moment some contemporary readers may call…cozy.
Since the covid lockdowns, there’s been an increased demand for frictionless low-stakes fiction. These books dominate queer literary markets, often with titles like All the Spaces We Were Meant To Hold where two cartoon sapphics chastely hold hands in space on the cover. These books are marketed as hopeful, affirming, and important. A soothing balm in a chaotic world.
However, cozy fiction works best when contrasted against harsh emotional, material, or political realities. Babette’s Feast is so healing and edifying due to the deluge of post Franco-Prussian war tragedy that prefaces the film’s warm and wholesome climax. Chicken noodle soup is comforting when a blizzard rages outside your home, not during an August heatwave. Without darkness and melancholy, “comforting” cozy stories are muted and ineffectual at best, narcissistic and dripping with condescension at their worst. The 2022 novel Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree, feels like the direct inverse of Babette’s Feast. Where Babette comes into her community with nothing but acts of service, Legend and Lattes protagonist Viv enters the city of Thune loaded with wealth plundered from her years as an adventurer, and a dream of opening a business.
Conflict takes time in this story. Few obstacles impede Viv on her way to opening her coffee shop.. A quick flashing of currency in the form of platinum erases the few difficulties she does encounter. The most immediate narrative hurdle in Viv’s way is marketing. How can she get customers in the door for coffee – a product unheard of in this fantasy world that its denizens, per the book, “didn’t know they needed.”
Much is written about the healing power of coffee, community, and croissants in this cozy little book. It’s all warm smiles, gestures at jokes that aren’t actually jokes (though characters laugh anyway), and #goodvibesonly for our characters throughout. The thing is, it is hard to see the healing power of food and community, when there is nothing to heal from. The coffee shop’s customers are not fractured people, nor are they particularly unkind toward Viv. Despite their initial confusion at the concept of coffee, they accept Viv’s free samples in stride.
By contrast, Babette’s community is initially terrified at the exotic French cuisine looming on their horizon. They have nightmares that this strange woman they’ve allowed into their midst is going to serve them a witch’s feast. They’ve spent so long in cold darkness, that light and warmth looks evil to them. It is a low stakes conflict, but speaks to the hurt the community feels, and even when this is played for comedy, our hearts are moved for them.
Viv’s conflict is far less intimate; the local crime boss, the Madrigal, sends her lackeys to shake up Viv’s business for a protection racket. This is how business is run in Thune, with everyone paying the Madrigal a portion of their profits. Viv initially refuses on principle, but is hesitant to pick up her sword again to deal with this problem directly, even though we are assured repeatedly that she can.
A long speech is delivered by Viv’s coworker and love-interest, the succubus Tandri, that doing so would shatter the very life Viv is trying to create for herself in Thune. That solving this problem with violence would only invite more violence, and soon Viv isn’t protecting a cozy establishment, but her territory, and the mark of that violence would scar that happiness and new beginning forever. Viv’s internal conflict is about wanting to become a new person, someone who has committed fully to a nonviolent lifestyle, no matter how much easier it might make things.
It’s reminiscent of Granny Weatherwax’s speeches about not using magic to solve her problems in the Discworld novel Wyrd Sisters, of which Baldree has touted as an influence. The difference is that this wouldn’t stop Granny Weatherwax from doing everything she could to deal with a local tyrant, even if it came to breaking her own rules. When Viv meets with the Madrigal, they come to an agreeable arrangement, where instead of paying protection taxes in funds earned from the business, but instead in freshly-baked cinnamon rolls and pastries. The Madrigal becomes something of a Vetinari-esque figure, terrifying and regal, but no less benevolent and admirable for these qualities. The problem is that Discworld’s Patrician Lord Vetinari, despite being a dictator, is an actively positive influence on the city of Ankh-Morpork, while the Madrigal is introduced with her minions violently shaking down people for money.
It does not matter that Viv has entered into an agreement with a parasite and predator within her community, but that her own virtuous nonviolence, personal happiness, and profit is preserved. By creating the Madrigal, Baldree has inserted a problem into this seemingly idyllic community, but one that cannot be solved with the power of coffee and good food. Viv solves her problem with the Madrigal, but leaves the rest of the community to be looted from. Liberal inaction enshrined as virtue, because at least she didn’t solve the problem with violence.
Later, when a rival burns down Viv’s coffeeshop and steals a magic stone from the premises, the Madrigal returns with others in the community to help rebuild. It’s very warm and affirming and very convenient that once more an individual with power and wealth can grant Viv back her small business owner dreams. For a book that emphasizes nonviolence, it finds that wealth accumulated through violence to be a very convenient solution to life’s problems. Viv could not have earned the magic Scalvert’s Stone which drew her found family to her, without killing the creature whose head it grew from, nor would she have had the wealth to start this business without her previous sellsword lifestyle. When she loses everything, it is the looted wealth of her community deposited to her by the local crime boss that helps her gain it all back and then some. Violence is bad, but money obtained through violence is good.
At no point in the book does Viv ever do anything meaningful for her community that is not transactional in some fashion. Her found family consists of employees, customers, and business partners. She only gives out free food and drinks as a means of advertising in order to turn her neighbors into paying customers. She never gives of herself, never sacrifices anything to anyone else, or commits any act that is not self-serving in some way. She even prevents her old adventuring buddies from dealing with the Madrigal because it still might taint her business with violence, and so a parasite on the community is allowed to thrive for Viv’s personal benefit, and eventual profit.
It’s emblematic of the way predators in the arts and entertainment industries are tolerated by colleagues and fans until the accusations become too detailed and too numerous to ignore. It is the insistence of ignoring material reality and uncomfortable truths because to stand on moral principles might be inconvenient. It’s DNC-goers covering their ears so they don’t have to hear protestors shouting the names of Palestinian children blown apart by bombs sent by the Biden administration. It’s taking a big sip of delicious warm coffee and refusing to consider the enslaved children who picked those beans and congratulating ourselves on being so virtuous.
This is not uncommon within the cozy fantasy genre. TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea takes inspiration from the infamous Sixties Scoop, in which the Canadian government stole indigenous children from their families and placed them in residential schools with upper middle class white families. Klune takes this genocidal horror and uses it as fodder for cozy pastoral fantasy about found families. Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor functions almost entirely on a refusal to interrogate power structures, portraying its emperor protagonist as an entirely helpless but kind individual, all the while ignoring that empires by their very definition plunder and devastate entire regions.
These books are about characters in fantasy settings who must be important enough for big events to still happen around, who ultimately decide that their best solution for happiness is to ignore them. We move the camera away from the horrific events of the world to run our cozy businesses, our found families of employees entirely subservient to us. These stories might be more healing if they focused on ordinary humble people surviving a brutal world through acts of kindness, but that is not the ideology at play here. It is one of dominance and pastoralism, where everything must go the protagonist’s way while still enshrined in the virtues of inaction. They are benevolent dictators preserving their wholesome and cozy way of life, all the while ignoring the horrors just out of frame. Garden walls to keep us from seeing the empire’s watchtowers looming in the distance. They love the treats, but hate thinking about how the treats got here. Returning to Babette’s Feast, this is a story of an unimportant woman in an unimportant village and the world they occupy is brutal and terrible. Babette’s gift of a meal to these people who had nothing but gave what little they had by taking her in is made all the more meaningful by that sacrifice. She cannot give riches to these people as much as she can’t stop the war that destroyed her family and livelihood. What she has is her culinary art, and some meagre winnings, which all are spent on her community.
That is more comforting to me than all the lattes, all the magical orphans working as paramilitary freedom fighters, or meaningless gestures performed by emperors who could and should do so much more. I do not resonate with these stories of powerful figures who know so little of economic hardship they can buy anything and anyone they want. Our world is devastated by the rich and powerful, not healed by it. I’m sickened by stories of good things happening to those privileged enough to look away from material reality, by those who ignore oppression and horror in the face of their own comfort, by the seeking of comfort itself as noble and virtuous. It is not empathy that promotes these actions but a profound lack of it, disgust and antipathy towards the wretched and the suffering because it upsets our pastoral worldview.
In the last few weeks, I have found comfort in cooking for my friends and my community. It’s hard not to imagine myself as Babette in her fabulous apron, full of quiet dignity, performing an act of love and labor for others. I am poor and have so little, but I can do these things and more for the people around me, and this more than anything else sustains me. As Ursula Leguin wrote in The Dispossessed, there is no hand that will save us if we do not reach out our hand, and the hands we reach out are empty because we have nothing, but we are free. This is far more fulfilling than ignoring the suffering around me, because I am part of that suffering, and I am not alone, and I can do something about it. I can relieve it, even if just a little.
That is comfort, not in escape, but in service.
